Auto Deploy GUI is a front end interface to the Auto Deploy/Stateless infrastructure.

Features

The Auto Deploy GUI is a vSphere plug-in for the VMware vSphere Auto Deploy component. The GUI plug-in allows a user to easily manage the setup and deployment requirements in a stateless environment managed by Auto Deploy. Some of the features provided through the GUI include the ability to add/remove Depots, list/create/modify Image Profiles, list VIB details, create/modify rules to map hosts to Image Profiles, check compliance of hosts against these rules and re-mediate hosts.

This is an Open Source Fling. You can get the source code and download from the GitHub project page. You can view the license here.

This Fling is intended to be used by end users who run a rolling-release Linux distribution (Arch Linux for instance).  On those operating systems, the kernel is updated regularly, sometimes multiple times a week. Each time an update occurs, the user has to trigger the build of the kernel modules when Workstation starts. The module aims to avoid this effect.

The Workstation DKMS module provides a way to automatically build the Workstation kernel module at boot time. It uses a tool that is available on each Linux distribution: Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) to trigger the build and install the module. This DKMS module only launches the Workstation build tool and lets it build and install the kernel modules.

ESXtopNGC Plugin is an enhanced, plugin-version of ESXtop for the vSphere Web Client. The plugin displays ESX server stats in new and more powerful ways by tapping into the GUI capabilities of the Web Client.

Features

• Separate tabs for CPU, memory, network and disk performance statistics
• Flexible batch output
• Flexible counter selection
• Advanced data grid for displaying stats (sortable columns, expandable rows, etc.)
• Configurable refresh rate
• VM-only stats
• Embedded tooltip for counter description

Click to enlarge

The VMware OS Optimization Tool helps optimize Windows 7/8/2008/2012 systems for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems. Since most Windows system services are enabled by default, the optimization tool can be used to easily disable unnecessary services and features to improve performance.

You can perform the following actions using the VMware OS Optimization Tool:

• Local Analyze/Optimize
• Rempte Analyze/Optimize
• Optimization History
• Managing Templates

New for version 2014!

• Updated templates for Windows 7/8 – based on VMware’s OS Optimization Guide
• New templates for Windows 2008/2012 RDSH servers for use as a desktop
• Single portal EXE design for ease of deployment and distribution
• Combination of Remote and Local tools into one tool
• Better template management, with built in and user-definable templates
• Results report export feature.

Various bug fixes, usability enhancements, and GUI layout updates.

This Fling is a simple tool that enables the migration of vCloud Director virtual machines and templates from the default any storage profile to a specific storage profile. The tool can be run from the command-line with the help of a configuration file, and it allows you to change storage profiles in a batch style of processing.

Features

• Change storage policies of vCloud Director VM’s
• Change storage policies of vCloud Director VApp templates

The tool provides flexibility allowing users to use the same at organization level/ VApp level and catalog level.

VMware vSphere® Big Data Extensions (BDE) simplifies running Big Data workloads on the vSphere platform.

vSphere Big Data Extensions is available as a fully supported product for use with vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise+ Editions. Built on VMware’s open source Project Serengeti, VMware vSphere® Big Data Extensions automates the deployment and management of Apache Hadoop and HBase on virtual environments such as vSphere.

The VMware Labs Big Data Extensions for vSphere Standard Edition (BDE-SE) lets you deploy Big Data Extensions on vSphere Standard Edition, but without commercial support from VMware.

What’s new in this release?

Big Data Extensions can be easily extended to deploy and manage all kinds of distributed or non-distributed applications. This release of the BDE-SE Fling adds support for deploying Mesos (with Chronos and Marathon) as well as Kubernetes clusters in addition to the Hadoop and HBase clusters.

Big Data Extensions simplifies the cluster deployment and provisioning process, gives you a real time view of the running services and the status of their virtual hosts, provides a central place from which to manage and monitor your clusters, and incorporates a broad range of tools to help you optimize cluster performance and utilization.

Big Data Extensions provides the following features:

• Fast deployment, management, and scaling of Hadoop, Mesos and Kubernetes clusters. Big Data Extensions enable rapid deployment of Hadoop, Mesos and Kubernetes clusters on VMware vSphere. You can also quickly manage, scale out clusters, and scale up/down nodes subsequently.
• Support for Docker. The Big Data Extensions for vSphere Standard Edition Fling includes support for Docker with Mesos, Marathon, Chronos, and Kubernetes.
• Graphical User Interface Simplifies Management Tasks. The Big Data Extensions plug-in for vSphere, a graphical user interface integrated with vSphere Web Client, lets you easily perform common infrastructure and cluster management administrative tasks.
• All-in-one solution. Big Data Extensions ships with installation package and configuration scripts for Apache Bigtop 0.8.0, Kubernetes 0.5.4, Mesos 0.21.0, Chronos 2.3.0 and Marathon 0.7.5. You can create and manage Hadoop, Mesos, and Kubernetes clusters out of box. You can also add new versions of these softwares into Big Data Extensions Server and create the cluster.

The ViewDbChk tool allows administrators to scan for, and fix provisioning errors that can not be addressed using View Administrator. Provisioning errors occur when there are inconsistencies between the LDAP, vCenter and View Composer databases. These can be caused by: direct editing of the vCenter inventory, restoring a backup, or a long term network problem.

This tool allows VMware View administrators to scan for machines which can not be provisioned and remove all database entries for them. The View Connection Server will then be able to re-provision the machine without any errors.

The Horizon Toolbox is a new web portal that serves as an extension to Horizon View Administrator. It has the following functions:

Auditing

• Sessions:  Shows historical concurrent session trend for last 2 days, last week and last month. Shows current virtual desktop connections by desktop pools, and shows virtual application connections by RDS (Remote Desktop Service) Farms.
• Usage:  Shows accumulated use time of users for last 2 days, last week and last month.  Shows all connections (user name, pool/farm name, machine name, connection time, disconnection time) for the past 2 days, last week, and last month.
• Snapshots:   Shows parent virtual machines of linked clone desktop pools and descendant snapshots in a tree view. The snapshots not in use by linked clone pools are marked in grey, so that the View administrator can remove the snapshots not in use.
• Clients:  Shows statistics for operation systems and versions of View clients in different types of view styles.

Remote Assistance

Remote Assistance provides the capability for the administrator or IT helpdesk to remotely view and/or control an end-user’s desktop in the Horizon View environment.  (This is also called session shadowing.)

Device Access Policy

Device Access Policy provides a whitelist to control devices that can access Horizon View.

vMaxGuide is an Android application which provides the maximum supported configurations of the following vSphere versions:

• vSphere 5.5
• vSphere 5.1
• vSphere 5.0

vMaxGuide also provides a comparative view of components across the three versions of vSphere along with the comparison of virtual Hardware versions of Virtual Machines.

Users can swipe between the different platforms displayed and select the component of interest. The app also provides a message to the user on certain components, marked by [*], which requires certain condition to reach the maximum supported configuration.

This Fling enables you to perform a what-if analysis for host failures on your infrastructure. You can simulate failure of one or more hosts from a cluster (in vSphere) and identify how many:

• VMs would be safely restarted on different hosts
• VMs would fail to be restarted on different hosts
• VMs would experience performance degradation after restarted on a different host

With this information, you can better plan the placement and configuration of your infrastructure to reduce downtime of your VMs/Services in case of host failures.

Please see the Instructions tab to get started.

Welcome to the latest edition of the VMware Technical Journal (VMTJ), Volume 4, Number 1.

At VMware, we have a very clear and focused corporate strategy: Be the leader in the software-defined data center (SDDC), end-user computing (EUC), and hybrid cloud computing (our VMware vCloud® AirTM service).

This issue of VMTJ contains several papers from our EUC organization, and I am grateful to Kit Colbert for acting as the guest editor for this issue. To quote from his introduction in this issue about the work of our EUC teams:

The EUC team’s mission is to enable a secure virtual workspace for work at the speed of life. The reality is that consumerization of IT is bringing more—and more diverse—devices onto company networks. The “one size fits all” one-desktop-per-employee model no longer works. IT now needs to manage a plethora of different devices, enabling rapid delivery of a user’s applications and data to all those devices while at the same time ensuring security and compliance. Users, on the other hand, are demanding a seamless, integrated experience. They want information and apps at their fingertips and want to be able to set down one device, pick up another, and start right where they left off. These are some challenging requirements!

This is certainly true. We are in the midst of a major shift in how workers go about their computing tasks in the enterprise, where mobile applications and cloud computing are rapidly becoming the primary modes of computing. Kit’s introduction describes the EUC papers in this issue, as well as a paper by Ravi Soundararajan and Shishir Kakaraddi on how social networking concepts can be applied to system performance management.

In addition to the papers from EUC and the Soundararajan/Kakaraddi paper, this issue contains two papers from professors and graduate students from Georgia Tech. The first, “Reducing Cache-Associated Context- Switch Performance Penalty Using Elastic Time Slicing” by Jammula et al., describes a novel hardware/software approach for implementing variable time slicing to minimize the context-switch overhead associated with cache-warmup slowdowns that can impact certain workloads, particularly in virtualized environments. The second, “FlashStream: A Multitiered Storage Architecture in Data Centers for Adaptive HTTP Streaming” by Moonkyung Ryu and Professor Umakishore Ramachandran, describes a design for a storage system that
is optimized for video streaming. This paper is an expanded version of a paper that appeared in ACM Multimedia 2013.

We take great pride in the work of our talented engineers, and we appreciate the excellent work and significant contributions of our colleagues in academia. As always, we welcome your comments on this issue of the VMware Technical Journal.

Curt Kolovson
Sr. Staff Research Scientist
VMware Academic Program (VMAP)

This Fling generates and collects DCT/SVI logs on multiple Horizon View components, remotely, batchly, and in parallel.

View components

• View Connection Server (DCT log)
• View Security Server (DCT log)
• View Transfer Server (DCT log)
• View Agent (DCT log, agent)
• View Composer Server (SVI log)

Features

• Support parallel execution mode, and sequential execution mode
• Configurable and fully automated, so it can be used as a scheduled task
• Delete old logs, according to setting, to maintain log size

The VCS to VCVA Converter Appliance is the winning idea from the 2013 Fling Contest. It allows customers to migrate from Windows vCenter Server with an External Microsoft SQL Server Database to the vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded vPostgres database. The Fling migrates the vCenter database, roles, permissions, privileges, certificates and inventory service. The target appliance will run at the same IP address as the source vCenter.

Open source license

VMware-Migration_fling-0.9-ODP.tar.gz

The Horizon View Persona Management Share Validation Tool is a command-line utility that analyzes user profiles and CIFS shares used by Persona Management to ensure minimum security requirements are met. Persona depends on two CIFS shares to function: the central profile store and the redirected folder share. If the permissions on these CIFS shares fail to meet minimum requirements, then Persona Management will not function correctly. Therefore, this tool has been created to analyze the settings and permissions on the specified CIFS share or profile, identify any incorrect settings or permissions, and suggest steps to correct any issues found.

Android vSphere Big Data Extensions Client is an Android application which provides vSphere BDE users a tool for monitoring and simple management of the vSphere BDE server.

Features

vSphere BDE Client provides the following features:

• Display all of the Hadoop clusters which have been created on the vSphere Big Data Extensions server and check their current status
• Allow users to perform some simple operations on each cluster (such as start, stop, scale up/down, scale out)
• View the datastores and networks available for creating Hadoop clusters

This Fling is a graphical user interface (GUI) application to replace digital certificates on the vCenter Server Appliance.  Easily deploy by selecting the components that need digital certificates replaced. This Fling works with vCenter Server Appliance 5.5.

The GUI wizard-based tool helps you by:

• Replacing certificates for vCenter Server, Inventory Service, Log Browzer, and Auto Deploy
• Providing Single-Sign On (SSO) that uses the same certificate as the vCenter Server certificate
• Collecting backups of previously deployed certificates and associated files
• Providing tool level logging

VMware has awarded three Graduate Fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year.

  Tudor David , École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Tudor is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof.  Rachid Guerraoui in the Distributed Programming Laboratory  at EPFL. His current research focuses on practical aspects of synchronization and scalable concurrency. In particular, he is interested in adapting synchronization to the increasing complexity and diversity of modern hardware. His work also attempts to reconcile certain differences between theoretical and practical assumptions regarding the design of concurrent applications. Before starting his PhD studies, Tudor obtained a MSc in Computer Science from EPFL, and a BSc in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

  Seyed K. Fayaz (Seyed Kaveh Fayazbakhsh), Carnegie Mellon University

Seyed K. Fayaz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is broadly interested in computer networks and systems with a particular focus on network policy management, network verification, network security, and content distribution. Before coming to CMU, he received a Master’s in Computer Science from Stony Brook University. Prior to that, he double majored in Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Iran.

 Soudeh Ghorbani, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Soudeh is a PhD student at UIUC, where she works with Brighten Godfrey. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from University of Toronto and Sharif University of Technology, respectively. Her research focuses on building reliable networked systems, particularly correct network virtualization systems. Her recent research demonstrates that the most pervasive network virtualization techniques jeopardize application correctness and that erroneous application behaviors can happen while the network is still meeting the most pervasive correctness requirements the whole time. Motivated by those observations, her current research focuses on building provably correct network virtualization systems that preserve applications semantics.

VMware PowerCLI is one of the most successful command line tools for managing your VMware products. With many existing cmdlets designed for the system administrator or vSphere Admin, PowerCLI is the easiest and most powerful tool for managing your environment.

In the recent release of vSphere 6.0, we announced new features like NFS 4.1 support. This Fling adds a PowerShell module with PowerCLI cmdlets for managing vSphere NFS Users, required for the Kerberos-based authentication process of NFS version 4.1 Datastore. The Fling is an extension module for the PowerCli 6.0R1 release.

You can load this Fling as a module to your PowerCli 6.0R1 installation. To see how to install, please follow the Instructions section of this Fling.

The VMware View Events Database is used to record all the events that happen in a View environment. There is a great deal of good information in the database, but it can be difficult to extract. This utility allows administrators to easily apply very detailed filtering to the data and export it to a .CSV file. You can filter on time range, event severity, event source, session type (application or desktop), usernames and event types. The application allows for extremely granular export of data. The exported columns can also be customized and the application will export data from both the live and the historical tables in the View Events Database.

The VMware OS Optimization Tool helps optimize Windows 7/8/2008/2012 systems for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems. Since most Windows system services are enabled by default, the optimization tool can be used to easily disable unnecessary services and features to improve performance.

You can perform the following actions using the VMware OS Optimization Tool:

• Local Analyze/Optimize
• Remote Analyze
• Optimization History and Rollback
• Managing Templates